A new English study by Nafilyan et al published in Nature Communications has revived a heated debate about what we do and don’t know about cardiac adverse events following mRNA vaccination -- specifically about how often they are fatal.
We will be publishing some official data from the Israeli Ministry of Health soon: Only one child died in Israel from Covid-19 out of 3 million children (ages 0-18) along 3 years. Earlier figures had claimed it was more than a dozen, but a well-written FOIA request revealed that the vast majority had died from OTHER reasons and was just Covid-19-positive. Follow us to learn more about what's happening in Israel.
Thank you for this post. While COVID topics are starting to get highly boring, shaping pandemic health policy and educating the common masses about EBM and harms of over medicalization is paramount.
Good article. It applies to me. I am a 21 year old male. I got jabbed and tried to refuse the boosters. But my college mandated me to take the first one which I did. Then the bivalent came out and covidiots in my immediate family tried to get me to take it. I refused and hoped the CDC would affirm my decision by making it optional.
Instead they recommended it universally. Another study found that the booster was no more dangerous than the first 3 shots. So I gave in.
Then I've noticed health issues such as abnormal heartbeat and chest pains. These may be only the tip of the iceberg.
1. I don't see a clear discussion of how they did their sensitivity analysis of defining risk and control periods. It is possible they did not try all combination. You need to vary the lengths of both periods, and also slide them left and right. Brute force of all combinations is needed. This sounds a bit like p-hacking, but a priori we know it is needed to overcome so many unknown variables of where the real risk occurs. The control period should also include periods prior to vaccination, not just after (not for SCCS dead people, as another comment pointed out, but wherever relevant). I personally do not think such a brute force search requires adjustment for multiple comparisons. But what do you folk think? (One may argue these authors should have done so and it is all noise, since they calculated so many different confidence intervals)
2. Of course if healthy user bias conceals the real risk in the first few weeks, no amount of shifting periods can fix that.
3. Something is funny with the reduction in all-cause death after 2nd the 3rd doses. Even if you remove the first few weeks for healthy vaccinee bias, almost all the weekly point estimates point in the negative direction. Why?
4. I did not read this paper closely, but any parts that used ONS data need to be scrutinized carefully. Many people have shows more problems with their dataset that can even be remembered. By extension, I no longer trust any government data to be accurate.
5. What is defined as "vaccinated"? Is it date of vaccination, or is it 2 weeks after a shot? They do not state. That is a mistake that has been made to serious consequence numerous times in cohort studies which has caused people to miss a potentially increased covid risk in the first 2 weeks after vaccination. Such a mistake here would obviously invalidate the study. The ONS did this definitional shenanigans. I believe they fixed it recently but I have not verified.
6. Also consider survival bias. The healthiest are the ones that make it through to the third shot without dying or getting of the treadmill due to side effects.
7. I believe in the UK first and second dose have 12 week spacing. This could have the control period for the first dose to be the risk period for the second dose. Tell me they didn't do that?
8. SCCS is basically a lower bound on reality in terms of risk. This author is smart to understand this. And smart not to dismiss nonsignificant effects. SCCS has low false positives and high false negatives IMO.
I am interested in the Mechanisms of Heart Damage by the mRNA jabs, which is now proven without doubt in law courts and compensation payouts mount. You might be interested in my article which lays out the key role of Endotoxin that is in every vial as the most plausible cause of this tragedy.
It strikes me that the English paper is an attempt at a whitewash of major issues with the vaccine. (1) There is no doubt that there is a huge increase in risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis in the demographic (young people) that are least at risk of Covid and therefore should never have been forced to be vaccinated. (2) Of course the immediate incidence (within 12 weeks) of death post-myocarditis is very low but that's neither here nor there – the question is what is going to happen 40-50 years in the future as there is likely to be an increase in cardiovascular disease as a long-term consequence following myocarditis and consequent cardiac scarring (e.g. congestive cardiac failure, arrhythmias, etc... occurring much earlier than they normally would). (3) Despite what Wallenski and others at the CDC and in the US government/public health may say, there is no such thing as mild myocarditis that requires hospitalization – by definition any hospitalization for a medical reason is severe as hospitalization indicates that one cannot treat at home.
And as an aside, if one asks any cardiologist one will find that they are seeing a lot more myocarditis in their practices than they ever did before. Prior to vaccination, they may have seen 1 or 2 cases in an entire career. Now it's a common occurence.
Looking at the first graph in Fig. 7a of the study's supplement: What is causing the reduction in all-cause death at long periods (15-24 weeks)? This would seem to be spurious, as the expected result is 1. The short end is also below 1 for spurious reasons that were explained as "healthy vaccinees". So probably the whole graph should be shifted to the right by about 35% to eliminate those spurious effects. Then all-cause deaths would be seriously elevated at week 12, by 25% or so.
Edit: that comment was a little glib, as the benefit for the 24 week period would seem to represent real mortality. Nevertheless, 35% reduction in all cause mortality is a huge unexplained aspect of the data. Most other countries did not have much change in death rate among young people.
I'm looking a little closer at the study, and it seems like you're burying the lede!
From the abstract:
"Here, we show there is no significant increase in cardiac or all-cause mortality in the 12 weeks following COVID-19 vaccination compared to more than 12 weeks after any dose.
[non mRNa problematic for women]
A positive SARS-CoV-2 test is associated with increased cardiac and all-cause mortality among people vaccinated or unvaccinated at time of testing."
But then you write:
"3. Increased incidence of cardiac death post dose 2 mRNA vaccine in males (which was barely non-significant)"
"Barely non-significant"; do you plan on wearing masking and taking ivermectin?
Ultimately, adequately powered RCTs that actually included young people and didn’t end the placebo group a few months in would have been nice.
On the other hand, “vaccinating” young people against Covid was always a fools errand. Young people weren’t at risk.
Repeat after me: young people not at risk. No one would have noticed “Covid” deaths in young people if they weren’t ritualistically compelled to see it.
2015-2019 death rates from myocarditis for this particular age and gender cohort.
And all cause mortality.
Post-Covid pre-vaccination
2020 death rates from myocarditis for this particular age and gender cohort.
And all cause mortality.
Post-Covid post-vaccination availability
2021-2022 death rates from myocarditis for this particular age and gender cohort broken down by vaccination and prior infection status.
And all cause mortality.
Finding signals of low probability events can be particularly challenging. We can and will make both kinds of errors.
Finding a signal of adverse event does not tell us causation. It tells us to stop and investigate. Precautionary principle tells us we should err on side of caution. We've defaulted to 95% CIs but maybe real ethical thing to do is use 99% or even higher CIs. Clinical iatrogenesis is a real thing. Innumeracy is a problem. Hypernumeracy and randomness can also fool us.
I hope that "sensible medicine" will take up challenge of answering the question: By what method shall patients and physicians take action on the basis of probability?
Let's say risk for medical intervention is 1 micromort* risk (+\-) & for not doing intervention risk is 4 micromorts (+\-): do or not? How shall patients make decision?
*micromort = 1 in a million risk of death.
Appendicitis v appendectomy risks? How might casuistry help. Finding area of circle by inscribe and circumscribed polygons is useful exercise.
A problem especially challenging for very low probability events is the (+/-).
When is 1 in million indistinguishable from 4 in million? Any point estimate of risk has error. But breath of error and shape of error (might be non-Gaussian) is often unknown.
And in all of this, I suggest we remain cognizant of reality that patients are unique individuals. An individual who has had myocarditis before vax is not the same as person who hasn't. A person who has had some undetected adenovirus concomitant with vax is not the same as someone who hasn't. Patients who get 3/4 of vax dose or 1.5 of vax dose from distracted (whether or not well trained) healthcare provider are not the same. How about the 100 pounder vs 200 pounder. Etc.
Or for statins, is 10mg ATORVASTATIN prescribed when maybe 8 or 13mg would be better but pharma doesn't want to make pills in 1,2,4,8,16,32,64 increments (we forgot how to count in binary). How would we know?
This is a substack by an intelligent concerned anesthesiologist who went to the recent 23rd Annual World Vaccine Conference. The public health agencies and their representatives have no interest in increasing academic freedom at all.
Aren't the highest rates of myocarditis related harms from vaccination in the 18-24 y.o. male age group? If so, won't the inclusion of the full 12-29 age range tend to underestimate the rate of harm to this age group?
Thanks for a thoughtful discussion. Would note Astra Zeneca vaccine had much less use in the U.S., especially in health care, and a significant proportion of COVID cases in hospitals arise from staff contact. The balance sheet should include exposure of the vulnerable populations there, and risk to family and community contacts. Women are also at higher risk of debilitating long COVID. 3/million x the US population of 400 million is roughly 1200 events. Compare this to the 1.1 million reported deaths from documented COVID in the US - itself also likely an undercount, judging by excess death monitoring. Would like to have seen this context around discussion of this likely real signal, since vaccine reluctant folks who are much older, and have immune risks may only hear ‘vaccines are scary’ messaging without that nuance.
Thank you for your continued efforts to provide scientific data that isn’t corrupt. I’d like to share a story with you about a 6 year old boy who got myocarditis after his first shot. https://teamhumanity.substack.com/p/milo-and-carrie
We will be publishing some official data from the Israeli Ministry of Health soon: Only one child died in Israel from Covid-19 out of 3 million children (ages 0-18) along 3 years. Earlier figures had claimed it was more than a dozen, but a well-written FOIA request revealed that the vast majority had died from OTHER reasons and was just Covid-19-positive. Follow us to learn more about what's happening in Israel.
Hands down, the best summary of vaccine associated myocarditis in the first part of this post. Thank you.
Thank you for this post. While COVID topics are starting to get highly boring, shaping pandemic health policy and educating the common masses about EBM and harms of over medicalization is paramount.
Good article. It applies to me. I am a 21 year old male. I got jabbed and tried to refuse the boosters. But my college mandated me to take the first one which I did. Then the bivalent came out and covidiots in my immediate family tried to get me to take it. I refused and hoped the CDC would affirm my decision by making it optional.
Instead they recommended it universally. Another study found that the booster was no more dangerous than the first 3 shots. So I gave in.
Then I've noticed health issues such as abnormal heartbeat and chest pains. These may be only the tip of the iceberg.
A lot of issues here:
1. I don't see a clear discussion of how they did their sensitivity analysis of defining risk and control periods. It is possible they did not try all combination. You need to vary the lengths of both periods, and also slide them left and right. Brute force of all combinations is needed. This sounds a bit like p-hacking, but a priori we know it is needed to overcome so many unknown variables of where the real risk occurs. The control period should also include periods prior to vaccination, not just after (not for SCCS dead people, as another comment pointed out, but wherever relevant). I personally do not think such a brute force search requires adjustment for multiple comparisons. But what do you folk think? (One may argue these authors should have done so and it is all noise, since they calculated so many different confidence intervals)
2. Of course if healthy user bias conceals the real risk in the first few weeks, no amount of shifting periods can fix that.
3. Something is funny with the reduction in all-cause death after 2nd the 3rd doses. Even if you remove the first few weeks for healthy vaccinee bias, almost all the weekly point estimates point in the negative direction. Why?
4. I did not read this paper closely, but any parts that used ONS data need to be scrutinized carefully. Many people have shows more problems with their dataset that can even be remembered. By extension, I no longer trust any government data to be accurate.
5. What is defined as "vaccinated"? Is it date of vaccination, or is it 2 weeks after a shot? They do not state. That is a mistake that has been made to serious consequence numerous times in cohort studies which has caused people to miss a potentially increased covid risk in the first 2 weeks after vaccination. Such a mistake here would obviously invalidate the study. The ONS did this definitional shenanigans. I believe they fixed it recently but I have not verified.
6. Also consider survival bias. The healthiest are the ones that make it through to the third shot without dying or getting of the treadmill due to side effects.
7. I believe in the UK first and second dose have 12 week spacing. This could have the control period for the first dose to be the risk period for the second dose. Tell me they didn't do that?
8. SCCS is basically a lower bound on reality in terms of risk. This author is smart to understand this. And smart not to dismiss nonsignificant effects. SCCS has low false positives and high false negatives IMO.
I am interested in the Mechanisms of Heart Damage by the mRNA jabs, which is now proven without doubt in law courts and compensation payouts mount. You might be interested in my article which lays out the key role of Endotoxin that is in every vial as the most plausible cause of this tragedy.
https://geoffpain.substack.com/p/endotoxin-in-pfizer-jabs-causes-heart
It strikes me that the English paper is an attempt at a whitewash of major issues with the vaccine. (1) There is no doubt that there is a huge increase in risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis in the demographic (young people) that are least at risk of Covid and therefore should never have been forced to be vaccinated. (2) Of course the immediate incidence (within 12 weeks) of death post-myocarditis is very low but that's neither here nor there – the question is what is going to happen 40-50 years in the future as there is likely to be an increase in cardiovascular disease as a long-term consequence following myocarditis and consequent cardiac scarring (e.g. congestive cardiac failure, arrhythmias, etc... occurring much earlier than they normally would). (3) Despite what Wallenski and others at the CDC and in the US government/public health may say, there is no such thing as mild myocarditis that requires hospitalization – by definition any hospitalization for a medical reason is severe as hospitalization indicates that one cannot treat at home.
And as an aside, if one asks any cardiologist one will find that they are seeing a lot more myocarditis in their practices than they ever did before. Prior to vaccination, they may have seen 1 or 2 cases in an entire career. Now it's a common occurence.
Looking at the first graph in Fig. 7a of the study's supplement: What is causing the reduction in all-cause death at long periods (15-24 weeks)? This would seem to be spurious, as the expected result is 1. The short end is also below 1 for spurious reasons that were explained as "healthy vaccinees". So probably the whole graph should be shifted to the right by about 35% to eliminate those spurious effects. Then all-cause deaths would be seriously elevated at week 12, by 25% or so.
Edit: that comment was a little glib, as the benefit for the 24 week period would seem to represent real mortality. Nevertheless, 35% reduction in all cause mortality is a huge unexplained aspect of the data. Most other countries did not have much change in death rate among young people.
I'm looking a little closer at the study, and it seems like you're burying the lede!
From the abstract:
"Here, we show there is no significant increase in cardiac or all-cause mortality in the 12 weeks following COVID-19 vaccination compared to more than 12 weeks after any dose.
[non mRNa problematic for women]
A positive SARS-CoV-2 test is associated with increased cardiac and all-cause mortality among people vaccinated or unvaccinated at time of testing."
But then you write:
"3. Increased incidence of cardiac death post dose 2 mRNA vaccine in males (which was barely non-significant)"
"Barely non-significant"; do you plan on wearing masking and taking ivermectin?
Parhessia! You have to check your biases.
Thanks for covering this.
Ultimately, adequately powered RCTs that actually included young people and didn’t end the placebo group a few months in would have been nice.
On the other hand, “vaccinating” young people against Covid was always a fools errand. Young people weren’t at risk.
Repeat after me: young people not at risk. No one would have noticed “Covid” deaths in young people if they weren’t ritualistically compelled to see it.
An awful lot of words. Less may be better.
Here is what I want to know to start:
Pre-Covid
2015-2019 death rates from myocarditis for this particular age and gender cohort.
And all cause mortality.
Post-Covid pre-vaccination
2020 death rates from myocarditis for this particular age and gender cohort.
And all cause mortality.
Post-Covid post-vaccination availability
2021-2022 death rates from myocarditis for this particular age and gender cohort broken down by vaccination and prior infection status.
And all cause mortality.
Finding signals of low probability events can be particularly challenging. We can and will make both kinds of errors.
Finding a signal of adverse event does not tell us causation. It tells us to stop and investigate. Precautionary principle tells us we should err on side of caution. We've defaulted to 95% CIs but maybe real ethical thing to do is use 99% or even higher CIs. Clinical iatrogenesis is a real thing. Innumeracy is a problem. Hypernumeracy and randomness can also fool us.
I hope that "sensible medicine" will take up challenge of answering the question: By what method shall patients and physicians take action on the basis of probability?
Let's say risk for medical intervention is 1 micromort* risk (+\-) & for not doing intervention risk is 4 micromorts (+\-): do or not? How shall patients make decision?
*micromort = 1 in a million risk of death.
Appendicitis v appendectomy risks? How might casuistry help. Finding area of circle by inscribe and circumscribed polygons is useful exercise.
A problem especially challenging for very low probability events is the (+/-).
When is 1 in million indistinguishable from 4 in million? Any point estimate of risk has error. But breath of error and shape of error (might be non-Gaussian) is often unknown.
And in all of this, I suggest we remain cognizant of reality that patients are unique individuals. An individual who has had myocarditis before vax is not the same as person who hasn't. A person who has had some undetected adenovirus concomitant with vax is not the same as someone who hasn't. Patients who get 3/4 of vax dose or 1.5 of vax dose from distracted (whether or not well trained) healthcare provider are not the same. How about the 100 pounder vs 200 pounder. Etc.
Or for statins, is 10mg ATORVASTATIN prescribed when maybe 8 or 13mg would be better but pharma doesn't want to make pills in 1,2,4,8,16,32,64 increments (we forgot how to count in binary). How would we know?
This is a substack by an intelligent concerned anesthesiologist who went to the recent 23rd Annual World Vaccine Conference. The public health agencies and their representatives have no interest in increasing academic freedom at all.
Highly recommend you read this
https://open.substack.com/pub/madhavasetty/p/from-the-belly-of-the-beast?r=79kf0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Aren't the highest rates of myocarditis related harms from vaccination in the 18-24 y.o. male age group? If so, won't the inclusion of the full 12-29 age range tend to underestimate the rate of harm to this age group?
Do you understand that this is what they do not want?
"a depoliticization of discussing and researching COVID-19 ( AND OTHER) vaccine safety "
Thanks for a thoughtful discussion. Would note Astra Zeneca vaccine had much less use in the U.S., especially in health care, and a significant proportion of COVID cases in hospitals arise from staff contact. The balance sheet should include exposure of the vulnerable populations there, and risk to family and community contacts. Women are also at higher risk of debilitating long COVID. 3/million x the US population of 400 million is roughly 1200 events. Compare this to the 1.1 million reported deaths from documented COVID in the US - itself also likely an undercount, judging by excess death monitoring. Would like to have seen this context around discussion of this likely real signal, since vaccine reluctant folks who are much older, and have immune risks may only hear ‘vaccines are scary’ messaging without that nuance.
Thank you for your continued efforts to provide scientific data that isn’t corrupt. I’d like to share a story with you about a 6 year old boy who got myocarditis after his first shot. https://teamhumanity.substack.com/p/milo-and-carrie